


brought his knife

by Prim_the_Amazing



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protectiveness, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 02:08:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21468328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: It’s kind of assumed by default that if Gold Team has a mission, then so does Maroon Team, and vice versa. This is why when Grif gets an order to get his team ready and in the motorpool in fifteen minutes and groans and gets up to do it, Simmons gets up to go and gather his own people, despite not also getting a message.
Relationships: Dexter Grif/Dick Simmons
Comments: 22
Kudos: 209





	brought his knife

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_taller_tale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_taller_tale/gifts).

The war is won and over, but space pirates still infect the planet like vermin. Simmons has read the reports, the general estimates of just how many of them linger, and it's in the thousands. That’s a big number. It feels like a lot. Like there’s enough for it to be a serious issue, enough to have to stay in that tense, exhausting, draining ‘we’re in a war, we could be attacked and die at any moment’ mindset. 

But it’s surprisingly easy to forget about them. For so many years he’d fought in a conflict on the scale of ‘about half a dozen people on our side and even less on theirs’. It’s difficult to wrap his head around the fact that a couple thousand  _ isn’t that much.  _ Not when they’re all spread thin across the surface of the entirety of Chorus. Not when the space pirates have zero coordination, zero professionalism, zero internal infrastructure. They’re just a bunch of… thugs for hire. That’s all they ever were, except now they don’t have the promise of money and threat of violence to keep them in line. They’re disorganized and stupid and scrambling to get off planet without getting shot or arrested before Chorus’ long awaited cavalry arrives. Their only agenda is to dodge the consequences of their actions. No genocide, no revenge plots, no malicious schemes. Just run of the mill selfish cowardice. 

Simmons is so relieved to be dealing with a problem that makes  _ sense  _ again. Petty self preservation isn’t the stuff of cartoons and books; it’s real life. He feels like he’s waking up from a strange, intense dream called ‘war’ and he’s back to living in reality now. Stupid, silly, humdrum, low stakes reality. 

He doesn’t even _ see _ a space pirate. He just reads the reports, helps crunch the numbers, files paperwork, does some patrols, and works out with his squad (muting his external mics so that they won’t hear him wheezing like an asthmatic geek as they run laps). He eats and sleeps and showers and falls into a mundane, comfortable, predictable routine. He survived the war intact. He tried so hard and lucked the fuck out. He can go back to living now. 

With Grif at his side, of course. 

It’s kind of assumed by default that if Gold Team has a mission, then so does Maroon Team, and vice versa. This is why when Grif gets an order to get his team ready and in the motorpool in fifteen minutes and groans and gets up to do it, Simmons gets up to go and gather his own people, despite not also getting a message. Neither of them question it, or even really think about it. 

“War’s over,” Grif grumps as he walks, harassing his subordinates over text to get off their asses and get their guns and line up down in motorpool already. “I should get to retire with medals. Not  _ keep working.”  _

“Kimball said that she’s holding off on any official celebrations until the UNSC finally gets here and wraps things up,” Simmon says, doing the same, but much more politely and with far less trouble. 

There have certainly been more than a few  _ unofficial _ celebrations though, which Kimball had somehow completely failed to notice despite all of the dancing, shouting, chanting, roaring, and teeth rattling throbbing bass. And also actually attending a couple of them herself. She had drunk Wash  _ firmly _ under the table, to the delight of all onlookers. 

“Ugh. Bet they’re gonna steal all of the credit and act like they saved the day despite only showing up at the end. Kinda like America in World War Two.” 

“You know history facts?” he asks a little bit incredulously. 

“Only when it helps me dunk on The Man.” Grif pockets his communicator with a motion that strongly conveys disgust, most likely aimed at Bitters for being lazy in a way that makes him both bitterly envious (because he doesn’t get to slack off half as much any longer) and filled with rage (because it turns out that when other people are lazy,  _ you _ have to work more. Simmons appreciates the karma of Grif having to be on the other side of it for once). “Okay, so we can’t have the retirement party yet. A vacation, at _ least.”  _

The last few weeks have felt like a vacation for Simmons. Not because he doesn’t work most of the day any longer, because he still does. It’s just that the stakes have been so dramatically lowered that he feels like a heavy weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Now, if he fucks up, he  _ won’t _ be dooming dozens of people to their deaths and edging their entire side one step closer towards losing the whole war. 

If nothing else, this whole clusterfuck has been good for his perspective. Misfiling some paperwork doesn’t feel  _ quite _ as world shatteringly dire any longer. 

“Where would you even go? Don’t say--” 

“Vegas quadrant.” 

“Shut up. We’re banned from that place.” 

“We’re heroes! I bet we could use that to lift the ban.” 

“I think the ban is good for us. We lost a lot of money there.” 

“Ugh, loser.” 

“Idiot. I’m protecting your bank account.” To be more accurate,  _ their _ bank account. Simmons may or may not have fused them a few years ago. Just for convenience, of course. He enjoys budgeting and such, and Grif kept handling his own finances in the sloppiest way possible in front of him until Simmons was tearing his hair out in frustration and snatched the whole thing away from him to clean up his mess, again and again. In the end, it was just easier to make it official. Cut out the middleman, streamline the process. Grif has a very nice retirement fund set up, all thanks to Simmons. Not that he even asked for it, the ungrateful bastard. 

Simmons gets a message from Jensen. He opens it, assuming that it’s a confirmation, a cheerful ‘ready to go, sir!’ that he can rub in Grif’s face because  _ his _ squad is so much better than his. 

_ Lt. KJ: General Kimball said that we don’t have a mission?  _

Simmons stops in his tracks. “What?” he asks out loud. 

“What?” Grif asks, stopping as well and looking behind him at Simmons, a few steps ahead now. 

“Hang on,” he says, and sends another message asking Jensen if she’s sure. 

_ Lt. KJ: I was going to go and get Pearson and I ran into her and mentioned it and she said that the mission didn’t need more than one team. She only assigned Gold Team to it.  _

(The comfortable routine goes crooked.) 

“Oh,” Simmons says. “Huh.” 

“Seriously, what?” Grif snaps, nerves turning his tone impatient. “You’re making me nervous, asshole.” 

Spitefully, Simmons first takes the time to message Jensen one last time instead. 

_ Capt. RS: Got it, thanks for the correction. Sorry for the misunderstanding! _

_ Lt. KJ: No worries!  _

It turns out that it’s much easier to talk to girls if the girl is almost as nervous as you are. He delegates a _ lot  _ of orders through her. 

“This is a Gold Team only mission, apparently.” 

“What? Why?” 

“How should I know? Ask Kimball.” 

“No way. The first rule of being lazy is to never talk to the boss unless you have to. Every time they see you, they load off another task on you.” 

“Having something to do is a good thing.” 

“Only when it’s something that you actually  _ want _ to do. And who the hell am I supposed to talk to if you’re not there?  _ Matthews? _ ” 

There’s something warm and fond that twitches in Simmons’ chest at that, a soft  _ he only wants to talk to me. _ He ignores it. That is  _ way _ too touchy feely for comfort. 

“We can message each other,” he suggests. 

“Ugh. Not the same.” 

“You’ll live,” he says mercilessly. 

Hours later, and Simmons remembers that being seperated from Grif for any significant length of time is just as grating for him as it is for Grif. How does he keep forgetting that? 

He keeps turning around to say something, only for the sentence to die one word in when it turns out that he’s just talking to empty air. The space next to him feels hollow with his absence. 

Ugh. Fucking  _ stupid.  _

One time, Simmons had wanted to prove that Grif was such a useless sack of nonproductivity that he drained everyone around him of efficiency as well like a blackhole of laziness. Just to make a point. He’d coded a simple bot to accrue data from his devices, simple statistics. How much he got done, how many reports he wrote, how much paperwork he filed, how long his word count was, and how long it took him. He then compared the numbers from when he was working without Grif at his side, and then the numbers for when he was. He had been certain from the start what the final result would be. The graphs would clearly show that his productivity, output, and efficiency tanked whenever Grif was around to distract him with dumb jokes, lazy insults, idiotic bickering, and addictive bitching. The pure, objective science would show that Simmons was a paragon of professionalism when he was left to his own devices, to focus and concentrate on the proper things. 

So of course it had to show the opposite. He took almost twice as long to do all of his tasks when Grif wasn’t slacking off at his own job by his side. Simmons had barely been able to believe what he’d been looking at. Had combed through his coding for any faults or glitches. But it had all been perfect. 

After some time, he realized what was going on. When Grif wasn’t there, Simmons got… restless. Distracted. Annoyed, like he had a cold or was sleep deprived. He kept reaching for a Grif that wasn’t there, trying to bounce ideas off of him, complain about something stupid some idiot wrote in their report that he has to find a way to parse, and then he realized over and over again that he wasn’t there, and he just sort of… floundered. Kind of sputtered, like a flooded engine. It was like he kept trying to get into the zone, and some asshole kept throwing a glass of water into his face, throwing him off his game, making him have to find his composure again repeatedly. He kept finding himself just staring blankly at a screen, thinking bitterly about why he couldn’t be with Grif right now, wondering what he was doing, what he’d say about what Simmons had just thought of, if there were any excuse he could use to get back to his side without looking clingy… 

It had been such a deeply mortifying, offensive realization that he’d immediately deleted the bot and then tried to erase the computer’s memory banks completely, just in case Church decided to ever possess it for some reason, or whatever it was he did now that he was an AI instead of a ghost. He’d never mentioned the whole failed experiment to anyone, especially Grif, who would’ve been so, so smug.  _ I  _ am _ working, _ he’d say every time Simmons would point out that he had a job that he wasn’t doing.  _ I’m upping your productivity by fifty percent.  _ As _ if  _ Simmons could give him that sort of satisfaction. He’d never let Simmons live it down. 

That’s what’s happening right now. No Grif. He’s reading the same paragraph for the third time in a row, because it’s so long that by the time he’s in the middle of it, he forgets that he’s alone, and he looks up to tell Grif about the same ridiculous typo that he’s read and tried to share with him three times now. And then he’s embarrassed and angry at himself, and also Grif, and also Kimball, because this is  _ stupid. _

_ Capt. DG: this mission is so fucking lame _

Oh, thank god. He’s so glad that he didn’t have to cave first. 

_ Capt. RS: I’m working.  _

_ Capt. DG: your always working, whatever _

_ Capt. RS: *You’re.  _

_ Capt. DG: oh my god your insufferable _

_ Capt. RS: You’re doing it on purpose!  _

_ Capt. DG: *your _

_ Capt. RS: Fuck off, no. It’s you’re because it’s a shortened form of ‘you are’ and it’s the only way that sentence makes sense.  _

_ Capt. DG: i hope u know that i just tune u out whenever u try and teach me grammar _

_ Capt. DG: every single time _

Simmons’ shoulders had been getting tenser and tenser for the last few hours, in a way that spelled ‘you will have back issues that will make you wish you’d never been born during tomorrow's training’. Finally, they’re starting to loosen. 

_ Capt. RS: What’s your lame mission anyways?  _

_ Capt. DG: ugh _

_ Capt. DG: we’re just collecting some random abandoned ships so that the space pirates cant use them to try and escape the planet _

_ Capt. DG: they dont even work theyre broken _

_ Capt. DG: altho i guess they could make one or two working ships by using all of the still working parts in them??  _

_ Capt. DG: as if they even know how to do that tho lol _

_ Capt. RS: That’s it? Maroon Team could’ve helped with that!  _

_ Capt. DG: we’re mostly just stealing all of the useful bits tbh _

_ Capt. DG: blowing up the ones that are too big for us to take back to base _

Damn it, that sounds fucking fun. Something in Simmons’ stomach curdles with what he thinks must be jealousy, even though he doesn’t want to switch places with Grif. He wants to be with Grif, blowing up broken ships. (It’s longing. It’s missing him. Wanting to have fun with him, talk with him.) 

_ Capt. RS: You’re right. Your mission sounds lame. Get it over with quickly.  _

_ Capt. DG: im fucking trying _

_ Capt. DG: but matthews keeps whining about ‘being safe’ and ‘not blowing himself up’  _

_ Capt. DG: this is why i promoted bitters instead _

_ Capt. DG: hed just let himself get blown up like a cool person _

_ Capt: DG: like _

For a long moment, Simmons waits for him to follow that up with something. It doesn’t come. 

_ Capt. RS: Like what?  _

Another long, long moment. Did their connection get broken up? But then he would’ve gotten an error message saying that his message hadn’t gotten through. Did Grif close the messaging program, take off his helmet? Why? 

_ Capt. RS: Grif?  _

_ Capt. DG: hang on getting shot at _

_ Capt. RS: What!?  _

Grif doesn’t reply. Simmons sort of has a panic attack and then breaks down Kimball’s office door. 

Simmons has sent Grif more messages. Grif hasn’t replied to any of them. Simmons tries to stop opening up the messaging application, to stop looking at the long line of nothing but his own frantic questions demanding a response. 

“Not a single member of Gold Team has responded to any sort of communications,” Kimball says grimly. “The only reason we know that they were in combat is because Captain Simmons happened to be messaging Captain Grif when the attack occurred. If it weren’t for that, then Gold Team would’ve just mysteriously gone dark out of nowhere, from our point of view. We might not have even noticed it yet.” 

_ ‘hang on getting shot at’. _ That’s literally all they have to go off of. They have no idea how many people were shooting, what kind of weapons they had, or who exactly they were. Although Simmons has a feeling he knows who. Pirates. His stomach twists in a painful knot. He’d dismissed them as an afterthought, and now this. Now this. 

“It doesn’t make sense that they’d be able to kill every member of Gold Team before a single one of them managed to get a message out to us,” says Wash. “What makes more sense is some sort of EMP, or a signal jamming device.” 

Hope jolts painfully in his chest. “So Gold Team might still be okay?” 

“I wouldn’t say that they’re  _ okay,  _ considering how long they’ve been facing an enemy without backup. But completely slaughtered? Probably not. Even in the worst case scenario, a couple of them must have been able to escape in the chaos.” 

Simmons hopes Grif was a coward, today. He hopes he ran away at the first gunshot. A few years ago it would’ve been a sure bet, but now he has to hope. 

“For all we know, they won the fight!” Donut says with forced optimism that falls just a little bit flat. It just sounds… too good to be true. Something in his chest is clenched, stopping him from breathing without pain. He’d been so sure that they’d managed to get to the ‘happily ever after’ part now. Nightmare woken up from, war over and won, time to get back to boring, mundane reality where the day doesn’t just abruptly go from ‘normal’ to ‘terrifying’ in the span of one second. Just waiting for the last few loose ends to get tied up for him. 

Those loose ends are a noose around Grif’s neck, now. He hates not knowing if it’s too late or not, waiting in some awful sort of limbo to know if he can get back to his life eventually or if it’s all  _ ruined _ now. Has his life been destroyed or not? Is Grif dead or not? How long does he have to wait to find out? 

_ You’ll live, _ he’d said, so casually, so matter of factly. Like it wasn’t in question at all. Like he was taking it for granted. 

“But we know their last location before they went dark, right?” he asks, to try and get himself out of his own head. He doesn’t want to start hyperventilating again. It hurts. 

“Yes. We’re sending people over there now.” Kimball nods. 

“Maroon Team is coming.” 

For some reason, he fully expects for Kimball to fight him on this. For once, he feels ready to fight back. To  _ insist.  _

“Of course,” she says instead, shutting him down by giving him exactly what he wants. His mouth works, open and silent, and he’s grateful that he’s wearing his helmet. “We have no idea how many hostiles ambushed Gold Team. We’re sending in all of you.” 

Simmons goes and sits in the Warthog that Sarge drives, standing at the gunner position, with Donut sitting shotgun and Lopez strapped onto the side of the vehicle like a bicycle. Sarge may be refusing to acknowledge his growing cataracts, and willingly stepping onto a vehicle that he is driving may be tantamount to a death wish, but the simple fact is that Simmons knows that Sarge drives like a madman, and he wants to get to their location quickly. They skid out of the motorpool, almost running over Palomo on their way out, and he loses his footing several times. But he keeps clinging to the gun, and they’re at the head of the pack of vehicles driving out towards Gold Team, so it’s fine. 

The plan is to get out of the vehicles in a radius two and a half miles away from Gold Team’s last known position, and to then slowly comb through their way through the jungle as they head towards the centre. This way, they’ll hopefully be able to find any stray Gold Team members that fled the combat, earlier. And maybe pick off a lone pirate or two as well, if they see them. 

“Screw that!” Sarge cries, which is the other reason that Simmons chose this warthog. “I’m not going to waste an hour playing hide and seek! We’re going where the action is, stat!” 

“I agree, sir,” he says. 

“Should we tell Kimball?” Donut asks. 

“Maybe later,” he rushes to say. “I’m sure she’s busy right now.” 

Lopez says something, and Simmons claims that it’s another vote in favor of Sarge’s plan. They drive wildly past where they should have stopped, following the tire tracks of Gold Team’s vehicles. 

When they get there, it’s too late. The fight’s clearly already over. It looks the explosives that were used to sabotage the ships were repurposed for the battle that took place. There’s the notorious broken ships, a dead space pirate, blood, a dead Gold Team member, a severed limb, a dropped gun, another dead Gold Team member. 

“There oughta’ have been more bodies if they all bit it,” Sarge comments. “Wash’s theory must be right, then. Some of them must be running around in the jungle like headless chickens right about now.” 

Simmons braces his legs, and lifts a large piece of debris with his cyborg arm. The corpse underneath it isn’t Grif. He doesn’t get to feel relieved yet. He moves onto the next one. Not Grif either-- 

The corpse twitches. He flinches back, shrieks, startled. The not-a-corpse screams back at him. 

“Oh my gosh,” Donut says. “Matthews!” 

Simmons scrambles to lift the twisted piece of sooty metal off of the boy. 

“Oh god, thank you,” Matthews cries, voice shaking. “Thank you--” 

“Where’s Grif?” Simmons demands, hands on his shoulders. 

“Wh--what?” 

“Do you know where he is? Did he run? Did he get shot?” Is he dead? Simmons tightens his grip as much as he can, trying to convey how important his questions are with pressure and bruises. 

“I--” Matthews says, and then his voice breaks. Simmons’ heart skips a beat, a shuddering, painful feeling. “They took him.” 

_ They took him.  _ Not,  _ they killed him. _ Not that. His heart starts beating again. He sucks in a breath, and the oxygen almost makes him dizzy. He hadn’t been breathing. 

“Who, son?” Sarge asks. 

“The, the space pirates. They shot at us and then they used some kind of machine and we couldn’t radio for help and they had us surrounded,” he says, sounding panicky just describing it, just remembering it. “They wanted the ship parts. Captain Grif said that they could have them so long as they stopped shooting, that we’d surrender…” 

“Coward,” Sarge says, but it’s more reflexive than anything else.  _ Good,  _ thinks Simmons. Be a coward. Stay alive, above anything else. Who cares if a few douchebags get away with it, so long as you survive. 

It clearly hadn’t gone that cleanly, though. 

“But?” Simmons asks. 

“But then after we’d given them all of the parts they… they realized that they didn’t have the skills to make a functioning ship out of it. And they said to give them our mechanic or else they’d kill all of us.” 

Half of Gold Team knows their way underneath a hood. Grif insisted that they should be able to fix a car if they wanted to drive it. Any of them could plausibly pass as a mechanic, could probably even do what the space pirates wanted of them. 

“And?” Simmons asks, heartbeat still rabbit quick. “What did you do?” 

“Captain Grif said… he said that we didn’t have a mechanic.” 

_ Idiot.  _

“They thought he was lying because he was the mechanic.” 

Simmons closes his eyes. 

“So they took him. There, there was more shooting. I think Bitters set off the explosives we had left and I got pinned underneath this debris, but it gave the rest of Gold Team the opportunity to run away. All of us that weren’t already dead or, or trapped, anyways.” 

“Gold Team left him behind,” he says flatly. 

“I… I think they thought he’d get the opportunity to run, too,” Matthews says weakly. He’d been left behind as well. Had no way to help Grif, pinned to the ground the way Simmons had found him. It’s the only reason that he doesn’t reach out and _ strangle him.  _

“The situation must’ve been very chaotic,” Donut says soothingly. “I’m sure they just thought you were already dead.” 

“Oh, great…” Matthews does not sound reassured. 

“Did you see which direction they took him in?” 

Matthews points. Simmons gets up. 

“Wait a minute,” Sarge says, placing a hand on Simmons’ shoulder to stop him.  _ No, _ rises up in the back of his throat like burning bile. Sarge looks at Matthews. “About how many of them were there?” 

“Um, I don’t know, I didn’t get the time to count them all… maybe twenty? Thirty?” 

“We need to wait for the others, Simmons,” Sarge says, so solemn and reasonable all of a sudden when Simmons needs it the least. 

“They can catch up,” comes out of his mouth, like someone else is speaking through it. “I’m going ahead. As a scout.” 

As a scout. Not even he buys it. 

What could he possibly do up against twenty to thirty pirates on his own? He’s not a Freelancer. 

He doesn’t need to kill them all. He’ll just find Grif and then… sneak out. Just run away, like they’re good at. The space pirates are just petty thugs. If Simmons takes Grif back to the center of their base, then they won’t be able to follow them. 

“... Fine,” Sarge grunts after a long moment. “But we’re coming with.” 

“I think I broke both of my legs,” Matthews says. 

“Wasn’t including you, yellow belly.” 

“Oh. Okay.” 

They leave behind the Warthog, since there aren’t any tire tracks anyways. Just footprints in the mud. They jog steadily and Simmons wheezes but doesn’t stop, doesn’t falter. He’s always been bad at breathing right when he’s running. A part of him wants to just either suck in air desperately or stop breathing entirely. 

Eventually, they crest a hill and they see where this particular band of space pirates have been holing up. 

“I was expecting a volcano lair,” Sarge says, audibly disappointed. 

“It’s admittedly not very exotic,” says Donut. Lopez chimes in with something, and no one cares. 

It’s a barn. Well, a cluster of barn looking buildings, anyways. That’s surrounded by about half a dozen fucked up ships. 

“How do we know which one Grif is in?” asks Donut, which is, for once, an actually good question. 

“We don’t,” Simmons says, after spending a moment to try and fruitlessly figure it out. 

“Like biting into an apple with a worm in it,” Sarge agrees. “There’s no way to know from the outside. We just have to go and see.” 

Impatience claws at the inside of Simmons’ stomach, like he’s swallowed a feral cat. 

“We’ll split up,” he says. “Check out a building each and radio the rest of the team if one of us finds him. It’s faster.” 

“Sure thing, Freddie,” says Donut. Simmons resists the urge to kick him. 

“Dibs on the red one!” says Sarge, and starts circling the hill. After a moment, Donut follows him, and Simmons starts circling it in the other direction, Lopez following him. He hates having to keep his approach slow, cautious. He can’t get spotted. Painfully slowly, he gets closer. Closer. Closer. He and Lopez start drifting off from each other, heading towards seperate buildings. There are a couple of pirates sitting on crates in front of the wide, tall doors of the one he picks, but there’s a window that he could get close enough to see through. He just has to confirm whether or not Grif is in there or not. 

If Grif isn’t in this one, he’s going to crack a tooth keeping in his scream of frustration. Past the window, the lighting is dim and there’s a bunch of junk in the way, blocking his view. He grits his teeth and creeps closer, trying to see past it all. 

But he hears it before he sees it. The window is cracked open, just slightly. 

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m looking at.” 

It’s like every single quivering, painfully tense muscle in his back goes loose at the sound of Grif’s voice.  _ Alive. _ He’s alive. Everything’s going to be okay. 

“Liar,” a voice spits, and there’s an awful fleshy, thudding noise. Grif makes a ragged sound that feels like getting stabbed in the lungs to listen to. His relief is dashed, gone. They’re still in the middle of the fuck up. It can still go wrong. It isn’t the time for  _ oh thank god _ yet. Simmons needs to do something. 

Call for help, he remembers. That’s what he’s supposed to do. 

“Sarge,” he whispers, comming him. 

Nothing but static. With increasing dread, he tries Donut, Lopez, the rest of the Reds and Blues, even Maroon Team and Kimball. Nothing and more nothing. 

The fucking signal jamming device. He is going to  _ break it.  _

“Don’t try and be a hero. Get this ship flying for us and we’ll let you go.  _ Or,”  _ the voice from inside the barn turns nasty, threatening, “I can take off another finger.” 

Another. 

His mind goes cold. 

“I thought you wanted for me to fix your shit. How am I supposed to do that if I’m an amputee?” Grif spits back, casual and derisive, but he can’t hide how his voice shakes. With fear. With  _ pain.  _ Each of Simmons’ heartbeats  _ hurt.  _

“You don’t need  _ all _ of them, do you?” 

Simmons starts creeping towards the barn doors, away from the window. He can’t sneak in through it, it’s blocked off by all of the junk. A part of him wants to stay and listen, but he knows he has to move and do  _ something.  _ And there isn’t time to go and get the others. There’s guards by the door, but he decides that two people isn’t that much. A gun would be too loud, would alert the man inside the barn with Grif to be on guard, might end in a hostage situation. 

But Simmons brought his knife. 

The douchebag keeps waving his knife around like he thinks he’s goddamned Felix or some shit. The worst part is that Grif can’t stop himself from flinching if it comes too close to him, and he  _ sees,  _ and he smirks. Fucking unbearable asshole, thinks he’s hot shit just because he knows how to hold a knife by the right end and can use it on someone who can’t fight back. 

He’s got his hand clamped down so tightly that it aches on his other hand. Around the stump. Just his pinky finger, gone. Not a big deal. 

It hurts way more than it should, more than it has any right to. Bleeds more than he feels like it should, too. The blood has soaked through his kevlar by this point. 

His face and his stomach throb dully with bruises from casual backhands and vicious pistolwhips. His mouth tastes like blood. 

“Last chance,” Douchebag says. “Get to work, or else I’m taking another one.” 

Grif’s resolve wavers. He wishes there was a fucking clock in here, any goddamned way to measure time. He wants to know how long he’s managed to stall the guy for, already. 

It’s not that he cares so fucking much about making sure that these guys see justice, although at this point it would be pretty viscerally satisfying to see this guy crying like a bitch in handcuffs. He just knows better than to believe ‘if you just do this one thing for is then we will let you go with your life’. Why the hell would they do that? They don’t have a single goddamned reason to not just kill him once he does what they want, besides decency. And Grif fucking  _ doubts _ that they have that in spades. So he’s doing what he needs to do to survive: drag this whole thing out for as long as possible. 

Douchebag fake lunges at him with the knife, and laughs when Grif flinches. 

_ Fuck this guy.  _

Should he say no, and lose another finger? Or say yes, and fix the thing as slowly as possible? The latter sounds  _ way _ better right about now, but it’s going to lead to the end of this whole production faster, and at the end of this Grif is dead. 

“I’m not going to wait the whole day for you to answer,” Douchebag says, and his voice has gone from light and airy to flat and unamused. Grif has noticed that it does that sometimes, so quickly every single time, and what it means for him when it does. Fight or flight, he’s throwing himself out of the way before he even gets the time to think the decision through. 

A vicious swing that would have seen the knife’s hilt probably knocking one of his teeth loose wooshes by his face, just barely missing. He falls onto the floor on his back, the breath knocked out of him. The impact jolts through his body and radiates out from the stump on his hand like a gong when he jostles it, whiting out all of his thoughts. 

“Don’t fucking dodge,” Douchebag snarls, and he’s gotten so close while Grif was trying to breathe through the pain and scrape back up his thoughts. Crouched over him. 

He reaches out and grabs one of Grif’s wrists and yanks at it hard enough to make him yell in agony. Every time his hand moves, it’s hell. He tries to keep his hand in a tight fist, but Douchebag pries his fingers open with an unforgiving grip. The choice taken out of his hands. He angles his knife right, brings it slowly down to Grif’s index finger. Dragging it out, building up the dread nice and slow. Grif bets this asshole jacks off to animal carcasses, the bargain bin sadist. Blood gushes freely from his cut pinky finger, now that he’s no longer clamping down on the stump. He feels dizzy, lightheaded, weak. 

He can feel his pulse thudding throughout his entire body, and his eyes sting and burn in this awful, familiar way. He doesn’t want to give this asshole the satisfaction of a reaction that he would absolutely relish with far too much disturbing and disgusting pleasure, but he can’t stop himself. His breath shudders out of, his throat feeling too tight to properly breathe through. The knife splits skin, slow, so slow. 

“Stop,” he says, his voice breaking, breathless, frantic and desperate. “Wait, no. I’ll do it. I’ll do it!  _ Stop--!”  _

He isn’t going to stop, Grif realizes, and his bruised stomach seizes painfully with terror as he sucks his breath in, bracing himself for the pain, eyes clenching shut. 

The now familiar sound of a knife slicing through flesh. Blood, spattering hot and wet on his face. An awful rattling noise, like someone trying to speak through a plastic tube that a dog’s used as a chew toy. Grif opens his eyes, not understanding. 

Douchebag almost falls on top of him, face pale, eyes and mouth wide open in shock as blood pours from his just as wide open throat, but then someone grabs him and throws him off of Grif, tossing him like a garbage bag onto the floor. 

“Simmons,” he says, before the sight of him has even registered. 

It’s Simmons. Soaked in blood, holding a knife, breathing sharp and heavy. 

_ “Grif,” _ he says intently, and he sounds almost feral. 

Off in the distance, gunshots start firing. 

“About time,” Grif says faintly. “This mission was boring as fuck.” 

Simmons makes a noise that was probably intended to be a laugh, and reaches out to Grif, grabs him by the shoulders, tries to haul him up. Grif blacks out for a second. When he comes to, Simmons is already looking less like rabid dog and sounds more himself, fussy and worried and high strung. Grif had made some sort of terrible noise, most likely, tearing out of his throat. He wishes he could turn that off, go all stoic and tough. But he can’t stop himself from keening when Simmons pulls him up to his feet, arm around his shoulders, supporting him. 

“Then let’s get out of here,” Simmons rasps. “I’m pretty sure that the rest of the army just reached us.” 

“What, did they get lost on the way?” Grif gripes, and bites his tongue so hard that it bleeds so that he doesn’t yelp as they start to walk. He didn’t want to make noises in front of Douchebag, because he knew that he was getting off from it. He wants to do it even less in front of Simmons. He can see the tension ratchet up in his spine every time he so much as whimpers. 

“I ran ahead of the group. They were taking too long.” 

Fondness for this fucking idiot pulses through him as they exit the doors. 

There’s two more corpses, lying on the ground. One got a knife pushed through his visor and into his eye, it looks like. The other has entrails pooled around his feet. 

The head of the corpse with the spilled entrails twitches slightly, and Grif jerks away from it as he realizes that it’s  _ still alive.  _ That’s a dying man, with his guts on the ground, outside of his body. A horrified noise escapes him. 

Simmons looks down at it, up at Grif, towards the distant gunfire. 

“Guess it’s too late to keep a low profile anyway,” he says, and draws his gun and shoots entrail guy in the face. The gunshot rings painfully loudly, without his helmet to help mute it, and he flinches again. His heart beats rabbit quick. But he’s glad that he’s actually dead now. He breathes carefully, trying to convince himself that he doesn’t want to vomit. He feels weirdly, horribly like Simmons just tried to do something nice for him. 

For fuck’s sake, he’s seen dead and dying men before. Has helped make them. He just-- all of his walls have been ripped down, it feels like. Everything hits harder. 

And as usual, Simmons’ startling casualness when it comes to the death of their enemies makes the whole thing feel more surreal than it should. Like Grif is the one reacting weirdly. They’re their enemies, after all. People who sold their humanity for the sake of some cash. Objectively bad people. Them dying is good. It’s that simple, right? 

It is for Simmons, at least. Grif decides that he’s too tired and hurt to care about more than that he gets to survive this piece of shit day. 

Simmons pulls Grif away from that awful barn, and Grif lets himself be pulled. He’s happy to see the last of that place. 

The final verdict is this: a concussion, a sprained rib, a broken nose, and a missing finger. And a  _ lot  _ of bruising. It could have been much, much worse. Simmons still can’t stop himself from hovering. He can’t stop himself from remembering with far too good crystal clarity the  _ noises _ Grif made when he’s hurt and battered. The way his face twisted. 

The way that smug bastard looked, looming over Grif with his own knife. Anger twists in his stomach, and he wishes that he could kill him over again. 

“Yes, yes, he’s good to leave the infirmary,” Grey says, sounding horribly put upon. “Here’s his pain medication. He can have that for such small, irrelevant injuries, since we don’t have to ration them any longer!” 

Simmons wonders if Grey will ever stop saying incredibly upsetting and offensive things in that cheerful tone of voice. She could at least sound as mean as her words. 

“Thanks,” he says a little numbly, trying to shake off the hatred for that dead man. It’s easier to dwell on than this sharp concern that it hurts to even touch. “How many pills--?” 

“I wrote instructions on the label, so please stop bothering me with boring questions!” With that, Grey flounces off to presumably go and spend time on some more exciting injury or disease. Or be awful to people with more boring ones. 

“Right,” he says weakly. “Thanks.” 

He’d already said that. And she’s already gone. 

Simmons drifts towards Grif’s bed in the infirmary, ducks past the privacy curtains. There’s no one lying on the beds near them, benefit of the war being over. 

He bitterly remembers thinking that they were safe now just because of that, and swallows an ugly laugh. He sits down on the chair by Grif’s bed. 

“Hey,” he says. 

“Heeeey,” Grif echoes him, smile dopey. He’s so high. Simmons can’t stop himself from smiling back, fond and amused. His chest feels too small to contain the feelings welling up inside of it at the sight of Grif, alive and smiling. 

“I can take you back to our room, now.” They’re captains. Technically, they could probably have seperate rooms. But if they didn’t share, who would make sure that Grif woke up on time to go to work? (How could Simmons fall asleep without Grif’s soft snoring in the background?) 

“Cool,” Grif says, sounding very sincere about this. 

Grif is obviously too blasted on the good shit to have a serious conversation with. And having a serious conversation at all just isn’t a Grif-and-Simmons thing. Not their thing, not their brand. 

“Why did you try and be brave, you idiot?” he says anyways. There’s no venom in his words. They sound nothing but brittle. “Who do you think you are, a Blue? Gross.” 

Grif scrunches his face up at him, confused. 

“M’not brave,” he says. 

“I know,” Simmons says. “It’s one of your better qualities, so quit acting like you’re a-- a hero, or something. You should’ve just fixed their ship for them.” 

Grif’s face smoothes out with understanding. “Ohh, that. Yeah. No. Yeah. I was going to. I was just making it take long. So you had time to come and get me.” 

Oh, fuck. 

Simmons has to hide his face in his hands. 

“Waz wrong?” Grif asks, sounding terribly alarmed. Simmons can’t stop himself from laughing at it. 

“Fuck you,” he says, voice trembling. “How dare you say something so fucking cheesy-- I’ll kill you myself.” 

Clumsily, Grif pets his head consolingly, like he’s a dog. A laugh escapes him again, making his shoulders shake. He scrubs at his wet face with his hands, sniffs, and gives Grif the best glare he can manage in his current condition. Grif doesn’t even do him the courtesy of looking cowed. 

“I know,” Grif says. “You called dibs on killing me ages ago.” 

Simmons remembers that. Sarge had been cartoonishly indignant at being beaten to the punch. 

“I’d never do it, though,” he admits. It’s the obvious sort of thing that you aren’t supposed to waste your breath on saying out loud. It’s… mushy. Embarrassingly soft. 

That stupid, bright smile on Grif’s face after he says it, though-- Simmons suddenly wants to say a hundred dumb, obvious, embarrassing things, if it’ll keep him smiling like that. 

He’s just in a mushy fucking mood, he guesses. The dark, violent mood that he’d been hiding in only moments ago feels miles away now. It had been viscerally fun to dwell in, in an angry, satisfying sort of way. Somehow, this feels even better. Lighter, easier to breathe in. He could live his entire life inside of this feeling. He really wants to. 

“I’d never kill you either,” Grif says. 

“As if you could,” he snorts. “I could smoke you.” 

Grif cracks up. “I love it when you say shit like that.” 

Gently, mindful of the bruises, the injuries, he shoves at Grif, scoffing. 

“We’re going together on your next mission,” Simmons says. “Orders or not.” 

“Nice,” Grif agrees easily, with no teasing. 

“You’re such a moron when you’re high.” 

“I’m always a moron.” 

“Yeah.” It comes out too soft, too fond. 

Simmons wants to take Grif back to their room. Except he looks so comfortable where he’s lying now, on the verge of falling back to sleep with a soft smile on his face. Simmons doesn’t want to make him stand up, make his brow furrow as the pain reaches him across the fuzzy gulf of the drugs. Not right now. He just wants to dwell here, in this perfect moment of relief. 

“Scoot over,” he orders, and flips over a corner of the covers, kicking off his boots. 

“‘Kay,” Grif says and makes space for him. Simmons gets in, and the bed is warm from Grif’s body. It’s like sticking your face in sheets that are still toasty from the dryer. He snuggles in, sighing as tension seeps out of his shoulders, going loose and pliant. 

“Just a quick power nap,” he lies. Grif hums, and Simmons likes the way he can  _ feel _ it through his chest. Grif tosses an arm around him, warm and close and perfect enough to leave him a little breathless. 

“Thanks for the rescue,” Grif says, low and close to his ear. 

“No problem,” Simmons says quietly. Closes his eyes. Presses a dry, silent kiss onto the nearest patch of warm skin. “You’d do the same.” 

Softly, Grif snores. A wave of content tiredness hits Simmons, an almost Pavlovian response to the bone deep familiar noise. 

He’ll get Grif to their room later. He’ll say… soft, mushy, obvious things that get Grif to smile, later. He’ll kiss him deeper,  _ more _ later. When he’s sober and awake enough to appreciate it. 

But just for a bit, he’ll bask in the happily ever after he has for now. And he has a knife strapped to his leg for anyone who wants to take it away from him. 


End file.
